Oracle touted what it called strong early adoption of its next-generation Fusion Applications on Monday, but also discussed how it will continue to support and add new features to the company's other business software lines, such as E-Business Suite and JD Edwards.

Leone spoke on a panel with other Oracle applications executives, each of whom described their product's recent improvements, road map and place in the Oracle universe.

Oracle's Siebel CRM (customer-relationship-management) software "continues to play a very significant role in our customers' strategies," because of its functionality for vertical industries, said Anthony Lye, senior vice president of cloud applications strategy.

"For us, the obvious thing to do is continue to innovate on the application" as well as try to lower the cost of ownership, he said. "It will maintain its position as a great, great product for many, many years to come."

PeopleSoft has one of its biggest releases ever in the pipeline, said Paco Aubrejuan, senior vice president of PeopleSoft development. "The number of large companies that depend on us to run their business has continued to grow," he said.

Customers can expect Oracle to simplify the apps to make them easier to use, he said.

Separately Monday, Oracle announced a set of new HTML5-based mobile applications for PeopleSoft.

E-Business Suite is also gearing up for a major release, 12.2, over the next year, said Cliff Godwin, senior vice president of applications development.

The key feature in 12.2 will be online patching. "People have been asking me to deliver it for about 20 years," Godwin said to scattered applause. "We expect that feature will substantially reduce, down to minutes, planned downtimes associated with E-Business Suite."

The news resonated well with Kevin Bixler, a business analyst at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, which uses E-Business Suite as well as PeopleSoft Campus Solutions. The school is on an earlier version of E-Business Suite, Bixler said at the conference. Online patching "would certainly streamline things," he said. On a scale of one through 10 rating desirable features, online patching is an eight, Bixler added.

Right now, it takes hours for a patch to be applied since it involves taking the system offline, he said. "In our shop, in order to do a patch, it's got to be a pretty bad problem, whereas with this we could be more regular with it and more up-to-date," Bixler said.

Of course, to gain that functionality Embry-Riddle will have to undergo an upgrade, which is also a goal of Oracle's even as it continues supporting older applications.